Losing Track
jjacquet | April 7, 2008The Economist published an article last week on jellyfish, which featured a fellow graduate student at the Fisheries Centre, Lucas Brotz. Can jellyfish really be the future of seafood? Jellyfish only provide about 4 calories per 100 g but, beyond that, there is a real danger of encouraging demand for a product that was spawned from unhealthy and poorly managed oceans...
Jellyfish push out incredibly valuable, and diverse, marine ecosystems. Scientists may somehow turn jellyfish into food, tyres or flip-flops, but it is hard to imagine an industry based on a product that is at least 95%…
josh donlan | April 1, 2008Avocados and Osage Oranges only make sense in the light of megafauna. That is because American gomphotheres (related to elephants) and ground sloths ate and dispersed those large-seeded fruits. While those megafauna went extinct around 10,000 years ago, many large-seeded plants in the Americas are still around today. If those plants once relied on those large creatures to disperse their seeds, why have they not gone they way of the dispersers? Three ecologists have gotten us one step closer to understanding why.
In a paper published in the open-access journal PLOS One, Drs. Guimarães,…
josh donlan | March 30, 2008Spring is in the air. And birds are starting to show up in America and elsewhere from their wintering grounds, gearing up to sing their little hearts out. Unfortunately, many of us are contributing to the decline of those birds by the food we choose to buy.
It is a complicated, globalized world these days. But, if you like those birds singing at your windowsill in spring, you may want to modify your grocery list.
In today's New York Times, Bridget Stutchbury wonderfully articulates the link between our food shopping habits and birds dropping dead left and right. And more importantly, what we…
jjacquet | March 18, 2008Well, I'm back in the Galapagos Islands for a couple weeks. The last time I was here was May 2007 and a lot has happened in the last 10 months (i.e., humans, including myself, continue to stamp their footprints all over this delicate archipelago). First off, Galapagos tourism continues to grow like a cancer. In the early 1980s fewer than 15,000 tourists visited Galapagos. Last year, 160,000 visitors came to the islands.
It's really hard to get a handle on tourism given how lucrative it is. Just two weeks ago, the head of the Galapagos National Park was removed from power after a two year…
jjacquet | March 14, 2008Young Mexicans have a warped view of what is 'normal' in the Gulf of California. This was first shown in a marvelous 2005 study on Rapidly shifting environmental baselines among fishers of the Gulf of California where the authors interviewed 108 fishermen.
Compared to young fishers, old fishers named five times as many species and four times as many fishing sites as once being abundant/productive but now depleted. Old fishers caught up to 25 times as many Gulf grouper as young fishers on their best ever fishing day.
Their results were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society and a…
josh donlan | March 7, 2008You know what a natural stream looks like, right? The Yukon in northern Canada or the Onega in Russia come to mind. If you are like me, you are pondering images of a sinuous stream with meandering channels after meandering channels. Ever since scientists started studying fluvial geomorphology - the study of rivers - those meandering channels have become the backbone that defines a natural stream.
Last month, two scientists from Franklin and Marshall College rocked the [river] boat with a paper in Science Magazine. They present a slew of evidence that suggests our view of a natural stream is a…
josh donlan | March 2, 2008I'm lying. But here I am blogging on Shifting Baselines. Over the past six years or so, I've spent a decent part of my energy thinking and writing about ecological history and its role in biodiversity conservation and society. That thinking and writing has included proposals that toy with the idea of bringing lions and elephants back to North America. Bring Back the Megafauna! a group of us proclaimed. To no surprise, our proclamation was met with gasps and groans (more about that later). When not pondering bringing the big stuff back, I spend much of my time restoring islands around the…
jjacquet | February 29, 2008NPR has a great story today about what happened in one Nevada neighborhood after new suburbanites complained about an old neighborhood resident--a braying donkey named Gambler. Gambler was shipped out of town and his 4-acre pasture might now be sub-divided into two lots to make way for more development.
Complaints of animal noise are becoming increasingly common across the U.S. as urban sprawl encroaches on rural neighborhoods that have traditionally had a few horses, chickens, and even a donkey in their midst. In nuisance cases, the law will acknowledge only 'reasonable' complaints--but…
jjacquet | February 28, 2008Holy moly! Check out this article in the New York Times reporting on a study that shows today 1 in every 100 Americans are behind bars (the overall number of prisoners has tripled since 1987).
jjacquet | February 27, 2008Andy Revkin also has a great blogpost at the New York Times on Our Exhausted Oceans. With opposition to aquaculture by many scientists as well as support for more marine protected areas, Revkin asks where we think seafood will come from in the future? My own answer: If we're smart, we'll eat like pigs--lower on the marine food web taking fewer of these small tasty fish out of the sea to feed to farmed fish, chicken, and pigs.
jjacquet | February 25, 2008Three shifting baselines to note today:
1) An article in today's New York Times by Andrew Revkin discusses how "scientists are setting baselines to gauge future effects on the seas." The article is a nice summary of some of the latest attempts to document the decline in ocean health even if it's not brimming with lots of new facts. This example Revkin cites is a perfect shifting baseline:
In the 1970s, I worked summers for the Rhode Island marine fisheries agency. At one point, I was tagging lobsters as part of an effort to find ways to revive depleted populations. A crusty old custodian in…
jjacquet | February 13, 2008A plastic garbage patch two times the size of Texas is floating in our oceans and that's just the beginning. This article Plastic Oceans in Best Life magazine is really horrifying. Plastics cover our beaches and make their way up the food chain. One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic. This poor deformed turtle (photo by Gregg Segal) is a victim of one piece of plastic (and gives a gruesome new meaning to phenotypic plasticity).
And, of course, plastics interact with our own bodies (perhaps even causing obesity and infertility) in equally horrific ways…
jjacquet | February 13, 2008My sister sent me a blogpost from Details asking Are You Raising a Douchebag? about parents "who think hink it's cute when 4-year-olds opine about Damien Hirst and demand heirloom tomatoes." The post comes comes complete with a photo of an "entitled hipster brat" giving the finger (twice).
My sister writes, "the photo from that article, complete with the title and sub-title, were shown at my church a couple of weeks ago. I'm not sure which baseline has shifted further--the goals and responsibilities of parenting, or the topics that are being discussed in churches today!"
It's a great…
jjacquet | February 10, 2008Check out these photos of Dubai; the first is from 1990 and the second photo is the same street in 2003.
jjacquet | February 7, 2008American asses widen and interest in conservation wanes as real life turns virtual.
We've already discussed how the average American is gaining weight almost by the day and yet Americans see fat as normal as weight rises. But a new study by The Nature Conservancy shows, perhaps unsurprsingly, that virtual reality games are replacing outdoor activities (and calorie burning). This has also reduced appreciation for nature and has a number of other undesirable side effects. "Videophilia has been shown to be a cause of obesity, lack of socialization, attention disorders and poor academic…
jjacquet | February 4, 2008Check out this wonderful article on shifting baselines by Colin Woodard in The Christian Science Monitor. Woodard describes UNH researcher Bill Leavenworth's hunt for cod fishing logs between 1852 and 1866. Back then, fishermen had no incentive to over or underreport their catch so what Leavenworth finds is more accurate than statistics today. He also finds, unsurprisingly, fishermen traveled less and caught more fish.
In the yellowing pages of these surviving logbooks lie the secrets of the ocean fisheries' past - and perhaps lessons for its troubled present.
Woodard's piece "Sea captains'…
jjacquet | January 27, 2008Can you stay awake for a book? Or are books going extinct along with the American attention span?
According to Ursula Le Guin (notable sci-fi and fantasy author now age 78) in February's issue of Harper's, the Associated Press ran a poll and announced last August that 27% of respondents had spent the year bookless. Le Guin is less indignant about the fact that more than a quarter of Americans didn't read a book than that the tone of the AP piece was one of complacency--the author admitting that getting sleepy while reading was "a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify…
jjacquet | January 25, 2008Good news! Gasoline is back below $3 a gallon. What a bargain. Everyone can stop worrying about the rising price of gasoline.
Okay, let me date myself in a big way. The summer of my senior year of high school I worked at a gas station where the price was $0.19 a gallon. That's nineteen cents. And then in college it shot up to over a dollar during the OPEC oil embargo and the U.S. had a nervous breakdown. Huge lines appeared at filling stations and we passed a 55 mph speed limit to reduce fuel consumption.
Today its three times that price, everyone drives Hummers, and yeah, I guess some people…
jjacquet | January 16, 2008Yesterday, from Seafood.com News:
Scientists are criss-crossing the Irish Sea on ferries, counting stinger jellyfish which are blamed for wiping out salmon stocks...Scientists suspect global warming is the principal cause of the jellyfish shoals...The Natural Environment Research Council has given an emergency grant of [$100,000] to launch a study of the jellyfish.
Recall that smack of jellies that killed all 100,000 fish in an Irish Sea salmon farm. But hold up. What's this about "salmon stocks"? The reporter is saying a bunch of salmon trapped in cages with no escape from stinging…
jjacquet | January 14, 2008To treat the "liquid highway" of storm runoff that drains into Chesapeake Bay after every storm, the U.S. Navy (likely the largest landowner in Chesapeake Bay) is changing the way it uses impervious surfaces. According to the Chesapeake Bay Journal:
The Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, VA, was recognized by the Elizabeth River Project for its use of nearly 38,000 square feet of pervious pavers that reduced traditional paved surfaces by 10 percent.
Old baseline: All natural
New baseline: All concrete
Award winning: 10 percent less concrete
Prize winning pervious pavers.
Awards for less…